Twitter Apps #1 – TweetStats

Twitter is everywhere these days and I must admit, it is my favourite tool next to e-mail and of course edocr. It is truly a remarkable marketing tool that I use everyday for both edocr and Northern StartUp 2.0. I also use twitter for user/customer engagement, news and collaboration.

What is also amazing is the number of applications that have sprung up using Twitter API. In order to understand twittersphere, you need to understand what is out there. On this regard, I will be making an attempt to publish short articles on interesting Twitter Applications I find. To start with, let’s have a quick look at TweetStats, which I found today for the first time.

TweetStats is developed by Damon Cortesi aka @dacort using Twitter Trends API (which gives me another idea for edocr). You can get the following graphs from TweetStats:

Most tweets sent today. @Schofe, @Stephenfry and @listensto tops the charts with 1,195, 1,064 and 667 tweets today. Well, I never thought one could tweet that much. Twitter is becoming a hotspot for celebrities.

Top 10 Twitter Apps today. Over 50% of the traffic comes through the web, followed by Twitterfeed, TweetDeck, TwitterFox and Twhirl being the other popular channels.

Today’s Top 10 Trends and Currently Trending graphs are also useful to understand what is hot.

That’s all fine, but what does TweetStats say about my Twitter activity?

It shows how many tweets I generated over the last 10 months (see image below)

Twitter applications/interfaces I used – TweetDeck, twhirl, the web and the Power Twitter are the most popular

Tweet Clouds – always useful. Shows lot of tweets on edocr

So how could all this help me:

Based on the stats, I should be able to change my Twittering behaviour – this could well be increase, decrease or continue as usual. I am yet to decide on this one.

Replies To analysis is helpful in determing Objectives vs. Activities, i.e. the level of productivity with respect to Tweetering, e.g. What was the overall outcome of my twittering with @mbites. A positive outcome is Mike Butcher’s visit to Northern StartUp 2.0 last month.

We never had this level of analysis available for e-mails, one of the most used technologies today. As soon as you start to analyse, you realise that you require more details. The assumption is that more detailed statistics will give more value. Twitter made us contest this view point. Twitter restrained us to 140 characters. On the same token, perhaps we do not need full detail statictis to understand our Twitter behaviour. This is a hard one to swallow as we are conditioned for wanting more and more information. And there is significant value in the Long Tail. But for now, TweetStats only provide limited analysis and therefore we ought to be satisfied with this level of information.

Will I be using TweetStats everyday? I am afraid not, but a monthly visit could well be useful.